The Austin weekly statesman. (Austin, Tex.) 1883-1898, 1887-09-08
A Blot Upon Civilization.
rom the New York Tribune

from the New I ork Tribune.
The conscience of Georgia seems at
last to be awaking. The convict lease
system is doomed. 1t is none too soon, for
IN some of its features it is as great dis
grace to our American civi ization as
slavery itself, and has often been charac-
teriZed by even greater cruelties and more
revolving outrages upon natural rights.
The wonder is that it should have endured
so long. Tho truth has been told about
it time and again by some of the best
known men III the south, but it was able
to hold its ground because men of high
standing and great influence, governors
and United States senators, were making
fortunes ont of it, every dollar of which,
1t is hardly too much to say, was stained
with human blood. Anyone who is Gu
riOus to see what an atrUciUus and wicked
system of convict slavery is still practised
in several states of the union, more than
twenty years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, has only to read Mr.. George
w. Cables accolnt f il, published some
years since. But even Mr.. Gable was not
able to tell the who.e truth about it, because
he could not write what women and
children might not read.
And yet when ex-Congressman FELTON,
introduced bill in the Georgia legisla-
ture two years ago to reform the worst
abuses of the system it received only for
ty-nine votes. This year he has renewed
his efforts, an investigation is in progress
by the legislature, and just in time, let
US hope, to give the system ITS death-blow,
disclosures have been made of dreadful
cruelties and abuses. The first of these,
which has not found its way north, was
with relation to the convict camps on the
Augusta and Chattanooga railroad. The
sanitary condition of the camps was
shocking. The states achief medical Off
Ger reported that he found "incipient evil
dences of scurvy or something very much
like it," With an average of seventy
eight convicts in camp, ne found that 645
days of work were lost by con-
victs through sickness in the previous
seven months, making five or six times as
much sickness during the same
period as in the camp on
the Georgia Midland. Governor Gordon,
it should be said to his credit, at once is
sued an order for change of manage
ment, and forbidding any further leases
to these contractors. The Georgia MID
land camp, it will be observed, was re-
ferreG to in the reports as by comparison
a model camp. It's lessees included some
of the most prominent men in the state,
among them ore ex-governor. And now
it has been discovered, by means of an
anonymous letter to the governor, that
convicts in this camp have been brutally
whipped for revealing abuses. Their
wounds made CHASTITY sight, which must
have recalled the worst days of slavery.
The lease is to be annulled, and so also
probably the one owned by Senator Joseph
Brown, though it is said there is no com
plant of that. But we fail to understand
why even United States senator should
be allowed to swell his millions by suct
hideous traffic.
These disclosures will doubtless help
the passage of Dr.. Felton's bill, which,
strange to say, has met with considerable
opposition. The bill provides for placing
of the juvenile criminals in houses of cor
rection, and for separating the female
from the male convicts, and so ending
some OF the worst horrors and cruelties
of the present system. Itwould be better
to go further and abolish the lease system
altogether The state has no more moral
right to hand over convicts to the unre-
strained and often brutal control of con-
tractors than it has to sanction
murder, which, indeed, it does,
for the latter often find 1t
cheaper to kill q convict by over
work than they do to keep him alive. This
shameful system prevails, with varying
degrees of abuse, in seven of the southern
states, and the state of Georgia, as the
report of the commissioner of labor at
Washington, Carroll D. Wright, on convict
labor, shows, makes profit of $4,000 q
year by handing its convicts over, body
and soul, men, women and children, to the
contractors. And the number of child en-,
by the way, that go into these convict
camps, where the soul dies if the body
does not, is dreadful to contemplate. Mr.
Gable narrates how the Governor of Texas
pardoned in two years POO convicts, one
fourth of whom were children between 10
and 16 years of age. Can such things be
in Christian land?